Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

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Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. A thousand times Yes. At least in a healthy company.

What exactly do you think separates companies like Oracle and Microsoft? Oracle has hundreds of very talented engineers. But their position in the market is stagnating.

This is hard for HN types to accept, but Engineers are not the people in software companies producing value. No individual person is producing value. Its a combination of the leadership who can lay down a plan toward something that produces value, and the line workers who can actually produce it. Both are necessary.

Here's the difference: If you need to replace an engineer, go for it. Who cares. There are millions of us. We're code-monkeys. If you need to replace a CEO, you better be careful. Github couldn't even find a good CEO, so they sold out. If you're not careful, you might get a Larry Ellison or a Marissa Meyer instead of a Satya Nadella or a Tim Cook.

Successfully leading companies legitimately requires personality characteristics that are present in less than 1% of the population. I would guarantee that if we dissected the brains of enough C-suite people from successful companies, we'd see some sort of genetic or brain matter similarities, probably something resembling sociopathism.

I don't think the marketplace makes a distinction between "good" and "bad" CEOs with regards to pay, compensation, and rewards. Stock valuations are speculative and a declaration of faith that you can sell the stock for more than what you paid. Good leadership is often unrecognizable until there's a crisis.

That's roughly true. And there's a good reason behind it: Its very difficult to tell when someone will be a good CEO. Hell, its really difficult to tell when anyone will be actually great at the job they're being hired for.

At least with an engineer, you can be hired by someone who could more-or-less do the job you're being hired for. Senior engineers hire entry-level devs. The CTO hires team leads. Who hires the CEO?

Often, there's no one in the company who is adequately prepared for that role, because the role doesn't have a job description. It doesn't have bullet points of what you do every day. Your job is to lead the company, set the expectations, set the results, for everyone else. That's the role of the c-suite.

i think we over-attribute the success's of companies based on the talent of both their CEO and their employees.

Here are some examples: I've worked in the gaming industry at big company for 5 years. I've seen a ton of games fail and few succeed. I was on the most successful game team that made hundreds of millions of dollars. And, I don't believe our team was more talented than all the other teams. We simply had the right market timing with exactly the right game, inexorably leading to an enormous success. Within this company many other teams built clones, executed just as well if not better and yet, none of those games received the success as the first one with the right timing.

"I've always found that the harder I work the more luck I seem to have."

Market acceptance controls whether a company might fail. It doesn't control whether a company might succeed.

Well said. I think the reason it's easy to feel that people at the C-Suite don't produce value is the "leadership" qualities that matter are very hard to define, and success or failure often doesn't make itself clear until months or years down the road.

As a lower-level employee, sometimes you think that the company would be successful without a leader, or even is successful in spite of poor leadership - while that may sometimes be true, much of what happens at that level is hard to understand unless you've been there

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